As is known in the art, human tastes are subjective in that each person has their own tastes based, at least in part, upon their own personal experiences and feelings accumulated over a period of time. Thus, an item which pleases or which would be selected by one individual will not necessarily please or be selected by another individual. Due to the subjective nature of individual tastes, it is relatively difficult to recommend or match items to a particular person based on information indicating individual likes and dislikes.
As is also known, one particular type of matching occurs when people seek to meet other people to enter into a particular type of relationship or to engage in a particular type of activity. For example, one person may be seeking another person as a pen pal with whom they can correspond, or as an activity partner with whom they can engage in social or athletic activities. Alternatively, one person may be seeking another person with whom an intimate relationship may be formed. Thus, people seeking other people to form particular types of relationships or to engage in certain activities is a particular type of matching problem.
One technique which has been used to aid in forming such relationships is to place an advertisement in a newspaper, magazine, brochure, pamphlet or the like. Such advertisements are typically referred to as "personals advertisements", "personals ads" or more simply as "personals." Many newspapers, for example, include a section identified as a personals section. Thus, people who would like to meet other people with similar likes and interests place personal advertisements in newspapers or other forms of print media.
To identify persons with similar interests, prior art techniques require people to answer a series of questions. Such questions may be presented to people in the form of a written question questionnaire which includes instructions directing the person answering the questions to provide information about themselves including their likes and dislikes with respect to certain topics. Such questionnaires also instruct people to rate or grade certain activities, thoughts, items, or personal characteristics or traits. The answers to the questions are used to define the users' tastes.
One problem with such a question-and-answer approach is that users tend to spend a great deal of time trying to select what they may perceive to be the "correct" or "best" answer. This results in a time consuming process which typically does not provide an accurate indication of the person's tastes. Consequently, when the information is used to match persons, the persons tend to be relatively poorly matched. Thus, when two people who have been matched using such a question-and-answer technique meet, the results are sometimes not what was expected or hoped for by the two people.
Similar problems in expectations and results arise when trying to recommend or match to a particular person an item such as a consumer product, a service or an entertainment event. In this case, people answer a series of questions about a particular product or rate a particular product in accordance with a particular rating scale. The ratings are used in mathematical computations to determine the mathematical probability that a person would like a particular item.
Due to the popularity of personals advertisements in newspapers and other print media and the increasing popularity of the Internet and the Internet's World-Wide Web there has been a trend to provide personals advertisement systems on computer systems and in particular on networked computer systems. Such personals systems are typically made available to the public through computer programs used to locate resources on the World Wide Web generally referred to as Web browsers.
Matching systems utilized in such personals systems, however, typically utilize the above-described question and answer technique to match people seeking similar types of relationships or items. The matching systems included in personals systems available on computer networks are time consuming for the user and provide relatively poor match results.
It would therefore be desirable to provide a matching system which can be used to recommend or match people seeking particular types of relationships or which can be used to recommend or match a person to a particular consumer product, service or entertainment event. It would also be desirable to provide a system to recommend an item to a particular individual based upon the individual's responses to a series of stimuli. It would also be desirable to provide a matching technique which utilizes acquires intuitive information from a user based upon the user's selection of particular stimuli from a plurality of stimuli and which utilizes the subjective nature of an individuals tastes. It would also be desirable to provide a matching system which does not require a user to rate particular items or to answer particular questions.